The present invention relates to a system for transmitting signals between an operating station and a remote reading station and, more particularly, to a means for transmitting information relating to a thermostat located in a controlled environment to a remote information collection center.
Control of an environment for living or working to thereby maintain the comfort of people within is usually necessary if the space containing such an environment is to be successfully rented or leased for such use. However, the comfort range of various environment variables such as temperature, humidity, etc., differ for different people. As a result, environmental controllers, ones having adjustable set points from which a user can select to thereby command that a certain environmental parameter value be provided, such as a thermostat, will have different ones of the set points it offers selected by different users.
A further consequence is that users in one environment will, in choosing different set points than users in another environment, have different usages of energy or other resources than do the users in another. This means that users in some spaces will cause greater expenditures for resources than others in different spaces, yet each should bear a proportionate amount of such expenditures. Such an allocation cannot be made, however, in the absence of information concerning the amount of resources used in each space.
Obtaining such resource use information for each of different ones of separated spaces, such as separate apartments in an apartment building, requires some measurement being made of resource use in each such space. Yet the cost of performing such measurements should be low so as to avoid significantly raising the cost of use of such space. Thus, there is a desire for a low cost system for the measurement of resource use, primarily for the measure of temperature settings as an indication of heating or cooling energy use.